"Would you go to the Moon?" she asks.

"If I needed to and could afford it." He turns to you. "Right?"

You consider your answer. Life still looks good to you - and stairways are beginning to be difficult. Low gravity is attractive even though it means living out your days at the Geriatrics Foundation on the Moon. "It might be fun to visit," you answer. "One wouldn't have to stay."

Hospitals for old people on the Moon? Let's not be silly - Or is it silly? Might it not be a logical and necessary outcome of our world today?

Space travel we will have, not fifty years from now, but much sooner. It's breathing down our necks. As for geriatrics on the Moon, for most of us no price is too high and no amount of trouble is too great to extend the years of our lives. It is possible that low gravity (one sixth, on the Moon) may not lengthen lives; nevertheless it may - we don't know yet - and it will most certainly add greatly to comfort on reaching that inevitable age when the burden of dragging around one's body is almost too much, or when we would otherwise resort to an oxygen tent to lessen the work of a worn - out heart.

By the rules of prophecy, such a prediction is probable, rather than impossible.

But the items and gadgets suggested above are examples of timid prophecy.

What are the rules of prophecy, if any?

Look at the graph shown here. The solid curve is what has been going on this past century. It represents many things - use of power, speed of transport, numbers of scientific and technical workers, advances in communication, average miles traveled per person per year, advances in mathematics, the rising curve of knowledge. Call it the curve of human achievement.

What is the correct way to project this curve into the future? Despite everything, there is a stubborn "common sense" tendency to project it along dotted line number one - like the patent office official of a hundred years back who quit his job "because everything had already been invented." Even those who don't expect a slowing up at once tend to expect us to reach a point of diminishing returns (dotted line number two).

Very daring minds are willing to predict that we will continue our present rate of progress (dotted line number three - a tangent).

But the proper way to project the curve is dotted line number four - for there is no reason, mathematical, scientific, or historical, to expect that curve to flatten out, or to reach a point of diminishing returns, or simply to go on as a tangent. The correct projection, by all facts known today, is for the curve to go on up indefinitely with increasing steepness.

The timid little predictions earlier in this article actually belong to curve one, or, at most, to curve two. You can count on the changes in the next fifty years at least eight times as great as the changes of the past fifty years.

The Age of Science has not yet opened.

AXIOM: A "nine - days' wonder" is taken as a matter of course on the tenth day.

AXIOM: A "common sense" prediction is sure to err on the side of timidity.

AXIOM: The more extravagant a prediction sounds the more likely it is to come true.

So let's have a few free - swinging predictions about the future.

Some will be wrong - but cautious predictions are sure to be wrong.

1. 1950 Interplanetary travel is waiting at your front door - C.O.D. It's yours when you pay for it.

1965 And now we are paying for it and the cost is high. But, for reasons understandable only to bureaucrats, we have almost halted development of a nuclear - powered spacecraft when success was in sight. Never mind; if we don't another country will. By the end of this century space travel will be cheap.

1980 And now the Apollo - Saturn Man - on - the - Moon program has come and gone, and all we have now in the U.S.A. as a new man - in - space program is the Space Shuttle - underfinanced and two years behind schedule. See my article SPINOFF on page 500 of this book, especially the last two pages.

Is space travel dead? No, because the United States is not the only nation on this planet. Today both Japan and Germany seem to be good bets - countries aware that endless wealth is out there for the taking. USSR seems to be concentrating on the military aspects rather than on space travel, and the People's Republic of China does not as yet appear to have the means to spare - but don't count out either nation; the potential is there, in both cases.

And don't count out the United States! Today most of our citizens regard the space program as a boondoggle (totally unaware that it is one of the very few Federal programs that paid for themselves, manyfold). But we are talking about twenty years from now, 2000 AD. Let's see it in perspective. Exactly thirty years ago George Pal and Irving Pichel and I - and ca. 200 others - were making the motion picture DESTINATION MOON. I remember sharply that most of the people working on that film started out thinking that it was a silly fantasy, an impossibility. I had my nose rubbed in it again and again, especially if the speaker was unaware that I had written it. (Correction: written the first version of it. By the time it was filmed, even the banker's wife was writing dialog.)

As for the general public - A trip to the Moon? Nonsense!

That was thirty years ago, late 1949.

Nineteen years and ten months later Apollo 11 landed on the Moon.

Look again at the curves on page 322. With respect to space travel (and industry, power, and colonization) we have dropped to that feeble curve #1 - but we could shift back to curve #4 overnight if our President and/or Congress got it through their heads that not one but all of our crisis problems can be solved by exploiting space. Employment, inflation, pollution, population, energy, running out of nonrenewable resources - there is pie in the sky for the U.S.A. and for the entire planet including the impoverished "Third World."

I won't try to prove it here. See THE THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION by G. Harry Stine, 1979, Ace Books, 51 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10010, and see A STEP FARTHER OUT by Dr. Jerry Pournelle, also Ace Books 1979 - and accept my assurance that I have known both authors well for twenty - odd years, know that each has years of experience in aerospace, and that each has both the formal education and the continuing study - and the horse sense! - to be true experts in this matter.

From almost total disbelief about space travel (99.9% +)to a landing on the Moon in twenty years from President Kennedy's announcement of intention to that Lunar landing in only seven years ... and still twenty years to go until the year 2000 - we can still shift to curve #4 (and get rich) almost overnight. By 2000 A.D. we could have O'Neill colonies, self - supporting and exporting power to Earth, at both Lagrange - 4 and Lagrange - 5, transfer stations in orbit about Earth and around Luna, a permanent base on Luna equipped with an electric catapult - and a geriatrics retirement home.

However, I am not commissioned to predict what we could do but to predict (guess) what is most likely to happen by 2000 A.D.

Our national loss of nerve, our escalating anti - intellectualism, our almost total disinterest in anything that does not directly and immediately profit us, the shambles of public education throughout most of our nation (especially in New York and California) cause me to predict that our space program will continue to dwindle. It would not surprise me (but would distress me mightily!) to see the Space Shuttle canceled.

In the meantime some other nation or group will start exploiting space - industry, power, perhaps Lagrange - point colonies - and suddenly we will wake up to the fact that we have been left at the post. That happened to us in '57; we came up from behind and passed the competition. Possibly we will do it again. Possibly - But I am making no cash bets.